The Cat Who Had 14 Tales

We dined at a table on the deck, and Stanley tried to leap onto the redwood railing nearby, but he missed his footing and fell to the floor, landing on his back.

“Honestly, he’s the most awkward cat I’ve ever seen,” Jane muttered. “Come on, Stanley. Aunt Linda won’t mind if you sit with us at the table.” She indicated the fourth chair, and he lumbered up onto the seat, where he sat tall and attentively. She said: “Stanley’s mother was Maple Sugar. Do you remember her, Linda? She had a litter of five kittens, but he was the only one who survived. He’s a little odd, but isn’t he a beaut?”

Spook was picking chunks of chicken out of his ramekin and gobbling them hungrily.

“Don’t forget the broccoli, dear,” his mother said. “It makes little boys grow big and strong. Did you tell Aunt Linda you’re going to take swimming lessons?”

“I don’t want to take swimming lessons,” he announced.

“It will be fun, dear. And someday you might be a champion swimmer, just like Daddy before his accident.”

“I don’t want to take swimming lessons,” he repeated, and he scratched his ear vigorously.

“Not at the table, please,” his mother corrected him.

To change the touchy subject I asked: “What do you like to do best, Spook?”

“Go to the zoo,” he said promptly.

“Do you have any favorite animals?”

“Lions and tigers!” His eyes sparkled.

“That reminds me!” I said. Excusing myself, I ran upstairs for the gifts I had brought: a designer scarf for Jane; a cap for Spook, with a furry tiger head on top. My gift for Stanley—a plastic ball with a bell inside—seemed ridiculously inappropriate for the sedate cat. A videotape of Shakespearean readings might have been more to his taste, I told myself.

After Spook had been put to bed, Jane and I spent the evening chatting in the family room, accompanied—of course—by Stanley. Jane talked about her volunteer work and country club life and Ed’s engineering projects around the globe. I talked (boringly perhaps) about thyratrons and ignitrons and linear variable differential transformers. Stanley listened intently, putting in an occasional profound “mew.”

I said: “He reminds me of a Supreme Court justice or a distinguished prime minister. How old is he?”

“Same age as Spook. They say a year of a cat’s life is equivalent to seven in a human, so he’s really forty-two going on forty-nine. He and Spook were born on the same day, and we always have a joint birthday party. I never told you about Spook’s birth, did I? It’s a miracle that I lived through it . . . . Let’s have a nightcap, and then I’ll tell you.”

She poured sherry and then went on: “Ed intended to have me airlifted to a hospital when my time came, but Spook was three weeks early, and Ed was away—hiring some more construction workers. The doctor was on one of his legendary binges, and I refused to go to the infirmary; it was so crude. The boss’s wife and a woman from Personnel were with me, but I was screaming and moaning, and they were frantic. Finally the sheriff brought a midwife from the nearest town, and then I really did scream! All she needed was a broomstick and a tall black hat. At first I thought she was wearing a Halloween mask!”

“Oh, Lord!” I said. “They sent you Cora! Cora Sykes or Sypes or something. She took care of me when I had that terrible swamp fever, and I think she tried to poison me.”

“She was an evil woman. She hated everyone connected with the dam.”

“It’s no wonder she was bitter,” I said in Cora’s defense. “Her farm was due to be flooded when the dam was completed. She was forcibly removed from the house where she had lived all her life.”

Jane looked pensive. “Do you believe in witchcraft, Linda?”

“Not really.”

“There was a lot of gossip about that woman after you left the camp. She said—in fact, she boasted—that her ancestors had lived in Salem, Massachusetts. Does that ring a bell? . . . She told several people that she had put a curse on the dam.”

“I heard about that.”

“It looked to me as if the curse was working. After Ed’s horrible accident there was a string of peculiar mishaps and an epidemic of some kind. And I never told you this, Linda, but . . . Spook was born blind.”

“Jane! I didn’t know that! But he’s all right now, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s okay, but it gave us a bad scare for a while.”

We talked on and on, until I remembered that I had to catch an early plane in the morning.

After I went to bed I felt uneasy. Maplewood Farms and the dam-building experience were so far removed from my familiar world of tachometer generators and standard interface modules that I longed to return to New York. There was something unsettling, as well, about the boy and the cat. It was a situation I wanted to analyze later, when my perspective would be sharper. At that moment, exhaustion at the end of a busy week was putting me to sleep.